With the technical convergence of different media forms, recent mobile devices, e.g. mobile telephones are equipped with various additional functions that offer graphics, audio and video. Mobile devices including cameras have become increasingly popular. Users may, for example capture and save one or more images in their mobile devices by a click of a button.
Due to size, power, and end cost constraints, cameras incorporated in mobile device may typically have limited resolution and/or field of view. One option for overcoming these limitations may include providing a panoramic image feature where a plurality of images may be combined to increase the field of view without compromising resolution. Such images can be created, for example, by digitally capturing, and later joining together, several sequential images. The user may, for instance, capture a first image, pan the camera to the right until a portion of the scene from the first image is viewable through the viewfinder or back panel display, capture the next image, and so on until the full scene is captured with a series of images. Captured images are typically joined using various stitching methods known in the art to form a panoramic image. Typically captured images are stored in memory in a compressed format, e.g. JPEG format.
Typically, JPEG formats employ the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) domain to save image data. Typically, the image in the image domain is converted from an RGB color space to an YCbCr color space. The image is split into blocks of 8×8 pixels, 16×16 pixels, or 8 pixels in one direction by 16 pixels in another direction. Each block is converted to a frequency space, typically using the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). Subsequently quantization is performed on the high frequency components and Huffman coding is typically applied.
The following patents and applications are generally indicative of current panoramic technology in “stand alone” cameras. The list does not purport to be exhaustive.
US20050152608 to Niemi et al. describes a method for stitching digital images using an image representation format. The image representation format includes data units represented as a Huffman-coded stream of coefficients of basis functions.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,907,626 to Toklu et al describes a method for motion tracking and constructing a mosaic of video objects as well as a method for synthetic object transfiguration from a mosaic. The disclosure of this patent is fully incorporated herein by reference.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,999,662 and 6,393,163 to Burt et al. each describe a system for automatically generating a mosaic from a plurality of input images. The disclosure of this patent is fully incorporated herein by reference.
Korean patent 0286306 to Choi describes a method of panoramic photography which uses a digital still camera to connect pictures to construct a panoramic picture using an LCD monitor. The disclosure of this patent is fully incorporated herein by reference.
International application WO/2005/041564 by KONINKLIJKE PHILIPS ELECTRONICS N.V. describes a digital camera with panorama or mosaic functionality. The invention relates to an electronic device with a digital camera, and to a method of enabling to create a composite picture using a digital camera. In some embodiments, the electronic device is a mobile phone. The disclosure of this application is fully incorporated herein by reference.
There are commercially available panoramic picture technologies available for mobile phones. These technologies include, but are not necessarily limited to:
Scalado Autorama™ (Scalado AB; Sweden);
Vivid Panorama (Acrodea; Tokyo; Japan); and
PanoMan™ (Bit Side Technologies; Berlin; Germany).
United States Patent Application 2004136603 to Vitsnudel et al. describes a method for enhancing wide dynamic range in images while the images are in JPEG format. The method comprises: acquiring at least two images of a scene to be imaged, constructing a combined image using image data of pixels of the first image and image data of pixels of the other images proportional to the weight values assigned to each pixel using a defined illumination mask. In some embodiments the acquired images are in JPEG format, the JPEG format including a DCT transform domain. The disclosure of this patent is fully incorporated herein by reference.